reading

Publishers often want to work closely with e-book outlets — possibly a little too closely — but it’s rare that they involve themselves directly. Pearson is taking that uncommon step by making a 5 percent, $89.5 million investment in Nook Media, the joint venture between Barnes & Noble and Microsoft. Some of the reasoning won’t be made public until Barnes & Noble provides holiday sales results on January 3rd, but Pearson is clear that it’s furthering its online education plans: it wants Nook Media’s distribution skills to make a “seamless and effective experience for students.” Just when we’ll see this harmony is still up in the air, though. Nook Media has yet to outline what Microsoft’s partnership means for e-books and e-readers, let alone how Pearson factors in. We’re not expecting a sea change until companies start speaking up.

Nielsen’s long been the gold standard for TV ratings, and as our watching habits change, the firm’s reforming its ways to keep track of what we’re watching. Earlier this year it combined its online and broadcast metrics to give advertisers a more comprehensive look at a show’s reach, and now its going to track how much buzz shows are getting on Twitter. Called the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, it aims to provide a look at real-time social activity during programming, so networks can provide tailored interactive experiences and better engage with their viewers. What kind of interactive experiences, you ask? We aren’t sure just yet, but you can get the full PR spiel touting the nebulous benefits of the forthcoming Twitter tracking after the break.

Interestingly, despite being trumped as a much ballyhooed savior for magazines, it seems few Americans regularly use a tablet to browse their favorite magazines (10 percent or less across age groups).

Nonetheless, the findings point to a mobile future for reading.

As we discussed last week, books and magazines are the fastest growing mobile content category by audience growth. News is the fourth largest content category by audience size and continues to show significant audience growth.

Whether mobile growth in news and books will be able to make up for lost offline or desktop-based revenue is another question. E-books typically cost much less than their print counterparts, for example. However, for ad-supported content, the huge growth in tablets sales should be welcome news because tablets are a much more promising ad platform than smartphones.

Last week, Verizon filed a patent for a set-top box that detects what you’re doing while you watch TV, and serves you advertising accordingly. Ew, weird, companies watching what I do while I consume content. Big brother! Chill, son.

“Methods and Systems for Presenting an Advertisement Associated with an Ambient Action of a User” describes a system by which a device captures information about what you’re doing while enjoying TV, movies, etc, and uses it to target advertising to you. Using a “a depth sensor, an image sensor, an audio sensor, and a thermal sensor” the system would be able to detect whether you’re fiddling with your phone, interacting with another person, as well as performing any of:

Now, this might seem kind of creepy, but there’s a few important points to remember before you freak out and sound the privacy alarm. First, companies like Facebook, Google, etc, are capturing all sorts of information about what you’re consuming online and using it to serve you targeted advertising. Second, any system like this would almost certainly require you to opt-in before peeking into your life. Besides, how many of these patents actually turn into products, anyway? [USPTO via Ars Technica via Betabeat]

Netflix just announced a couple of newdeals with Warner last week, and it’s now landed a big one with The Walt Disney Company. While it’s still a few years out, the company has announced today that it will be the exclusive US subscription television service for first-run live-action and animated films from Disney beginning in 2016 — meaning that theatrically-released movies will be available on Netflix during what’s known as the pay TV window (ordinarily afford to HBO and the like). That deal also includes first-run rights to direct-to-video releases, which will begin appearing on Netflix in 2013. What’s more, the two companies have also announced a separate multi-year agreement that will see popular Disney catalog titles like Dumbo and Alice in Wonderland be made available on Netflix beginning today. You can find the full announcement after the break.

China’s well-known for its long and illustrious history of censoring the web. But rather than just blocking sites, it’s employing some rather strange techniques—which means the online home of a small pet spa in Miami is receiving an insane number of hits every day.

New Scientist has taken a peek inside the sinister world of Chinese web censoring, and it makes for fascinating reading. Richard Fisher explains that, far from simply blocking websites, Chinese authorities are employing all kinds of techniques to prevent their population from seeing the real web.

Often that involves subtle tricks, like giving the appearance of a slow internet connection. But sometimes the country uses DNS poisoning, which uses cheeky redirection to throw up a website that wasn’t requested. In particular, a Miami pet spa, known as The Pet Club, is one of the chosen sites. New Scientist explains:

[W]hen people in China try to access torproject.org – a tool that prevents online tracking – they instead often get the IP address of thepetclubfl.net…

No one knows why the censors picked The Pet Club’s website. Until now, Dennis Bost of Universal Merchant Solutions in Hollywood, Florida, who set up the website for the salon owners, had been puzzled by the web traffic he’d been seeing. “I’m amazed at the number of hits they get from China,” he says. “They’re a grooming salon. No one is popping over from Beijing to have their Shar Pei groomed.”

Sounds likes a good idea, if you’re a Chinese official hell-bent on censoring the web without generating too much suspicion. Or at least, it used to seem like a good idea: let’s hope, for the sake of China’s online community, that Gizmodo and New Scientist aren’t routed to The Pet Club, too. [New Scientist]

When Google unveiled the Nexus 4, Nexus 10 and a refreshed Nexus 7 in October, the moment was arguably the crescendo of a change in the Android ecosystem that had been building ever since Amazon’s Kindle Fire first braved the marketplace in 2011. Along with a widely expanded Amazon lineup that includes multiple Kindle Fire HD models and a price-cut tweak to the original Fire, two of the largest players in the mobile world now have top-to-bottom device businesses built around selling at break-even prices and recouping their money through content. That might sound good on the surface, but it’s a bad omen for competitors that genuinely can’t respond in kind — and it could erode some of the values of diversity and innovation that we’re supposed to hold dear as technology fans.

Communication has been all too spotty across much of New York City and New Jersey since Hurricane Sandy struck the region, and those who can get through on their cellphones have found themselves on particularly crowded networks. AT&T and T-Mobile are providing some much-needed, if temporary, relief: the two have struck a deal to share their GSM and 3G networks in the area with no roaming fees or plan changes while the networks come back, with the best-functioning network taking precedence in any given connection. A return to the normal state of affairs hasn’t been fixed in stone and will likely depend on many, many factors, but it’s a much appreciated gesture for residents who might not have a choice to relocate for a vital phone call.

Google has introduced three new Nexus devices in three different sizes.

The Nexus 4 is its smartphone-sized device. It has a zippy quad-core processor, a 4.7″ display, and runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, the latest version of Google’s mobile oeprating system.

The Nexus 7 is Google’s mid-size tablet. A 16 GB model is $199 and a 32 GB model is $249. For those who need wireless connectivity on the go, high-speed data options are also available.

The Nexus 10 is Google’s flagship tablet. It features a 2560×1600 resolution, making it ideal for watching movies or reading magazines. The battery will run for nine hours and provide 500 hours of standby time. Google also boasts that it’s a “shareable” tablet, meaning you can have multiple users log in and maintain their own settings on it. It’s a good solution for a family who wants everyone to have their own user experience on the tablet.

Google’s Nexus line of devices are designed and branded by Google but built by hardware partners who bid for the business. They’re different from the devices made by Google’s Motorola subsidiary. (Google could in theory pick Motorola to build Nexus devices, but it hasn’t done so with this batch.)

We teamed up with SurveyMonkey to find out how people use their tablets versus how they use laptops/desktop computers. As the iPad becomes more and more popular, we want to know what people feel like they can’t do with it compared to a traditional computer.

According to our survey, tablets like the iPad are most useful for surfing the web, reading news, social networking, and playing games. It’s about tied with traditional computers for email. What is a traditional computer better at? Banking, shopping, creating documents, and doing work related activities.

(Also, for what it’s worth 73% of the people that responded to the survey said their tablet was an iPad.)

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.